Lyons: Home schools won't return to hiding

I've always been proud to tell people I was home schooled before home school was cool.

What I had largely forgotten about that experience, from the late 1970s through the '80s when I entered public high school as a junior, was the fear. But I remembered it vividly when the news broke late last week that a California appeals court had ruled that home schooling is essentially illegal in this state.

I know exactly how the estimated 166,000 home-schooled children in California, many of them here in the north state, must be feeling this weekend.

The thing is, not much about the actual law has changed since I was a kid. But until now, there had been a steady progression in the sense of security for home-schoolers. Public school districts work with them. Private schools cater to them. They compete openly in sports and spelling bees.

I remember a much different time.

Driving around during the school day in my mom's Chevy Luv pickup, I'd lie across the bench seat with my head in her lap so I wouldn't be seen. We lived in a small mountain community, and mom knew tongues would wag.

When she stopped at the grocery store or the Post Office, I slid off the seat into the floorboard, where she'd drape a jacket over me.

Mom was a pioneer in our community in the Sierra Nevada foothills. To this day, she's considered a mentor among the home-schoolers.

Like most parents who home-school, my mom simply didn't see an alternative she could live with. Her reasons were both religious and academic. She took it very seriously and planned a rigorous curriculum. She never cut me a break.

But both she and I lived with the fear of what might happen.

"Truancy" is still one of the ugliest words I know. At a very young age, I also knew what "ward of the court" meant, and you can bet that it wasn't just good behavior that kept me from sticking my head up from under that jacket on the floorboard.

But as I grew up, the environment began to change. By the time I was in fifth or sixth grade, I started an independent study program with the local elementary school and began taking standardized tests every year that verified I was on track.

My mom got more involved with other families that were home-schooling their children, and even started teaching some of them a couple of days a week. We stopped hiding so much, and I stopped worrying about truancy.

More people were doing it, more openly

Of course, people abused it too. I had friends who were practically illiterate as teenagers because their parents hid behind the pretense of homeschooling to work them like mules and deny them the opportunity to learn. Home schooling has its ugly side.

But there will always be good parents, like my mom, who will risk anything to home-school their kids.

While I've long believed that there should be performance-based standards for homeschooled kids and harsh penalties for neglectful parents, it chills me to think we might return to the days of hiding on floorboards.